“Oh, it is indeed a burning shame that there would be one law for men and another law for women. I think that there should be no law for anybody” (Beckson, I Can Resist 100). So said Oscar Wilde to a journalist interviewing him in January 1895. And for the first five years of the 1890s, it looked as though the British literary and publishing worlds, at least, were increasingly in accord with this Wildean perspective. Texts challenging the double standard of heterosexual conduct proliferated, even as bold articulations of same-sex desire appeared. At the same time, laws of all sorts that governed the production and consumption of literature seemed to be struck down daily. The three-volume novel declined and, with it, the circulating libraries' law of conforming to Mudie's definition of the reading public's tastes. New Women and other new realists gleefully violated the laws that required fictional narratives to end with marriage or, indeed, to provide some version of closure. In the sphere of periodical publishing, the law demanding that the visual arts be subordinate to words vanished in April 1894 with the first issue of the Yellow Book. The Bodley Head's new quarterly proudly stated that “The pictures will in no case serve as illustrations to the letter-press, but each will stand by itself as an independent contribution” (Stetz and Lasner 8).

With the hardbound Yellow Book, too, came the demise of any fixed notion about what constituted a book per se, based merely on look, size, binding, format, or price. The Yellow Book certainly resembled a book in all essentials, yet called itself a magazine, while doing away with such conventions for Victorian periodicals as the practice of publishing serial fiction. Richard Le Gallienne would later announce defiantly in that same quarterly in July 1895 (at a moment when, in the wake of the Wilde trials, to say this did indeed constitute a dangerous act of defiance), “The one law of externals is beauty in all its various manifestations” (Le Gallienne 320). According to Le Gallienne, who spoke with the authority of a voice coming from within the inner circle of the Bodley Head, one should no more classify a book, based merely on its appearance, than one should categorize the gender of a body: “To ask the sex of a beautiful person is as absurd as it would be to ask the publisher the sex of a beautiful book” (320–21).

In the first years of the 90s, even the seemingly inflexible laws of genre began to give way. These laws, of course, long had served the interests of publishers, whose lists had depended upon the enforcement of distinctions between poetry, on the one hand, and various prose forms, on the other. Such divisions had been equally convenient for and thus important to the British periodical press, throughout most of the nineteenth century, especially for the purposes of book-reviewing. But in 1892, at the same moment that Elkin Mathews and John Lane published Wilde's volume titled Poems “at the Sign of the Bodley Head,” they began running ads in the Bookman announcing their wares as a “New List of Belles-Lettres.” This phrase later was amended to “List of Books in BELLES LETTRES” for their own catalogues and for inclusion at the back of each volume, with the capitals used to draw extra attention to the unexpected element. The term belles lettres suggested that there was no differentiation between poetry and prose. Indeed, the first Bodley Head advertisement in the June 1892 Bookman to employ it listed several volumes of verse, but also Stephen Coleridge's The Sanctity of Confession, subtitled “A Romance,” with a short review appended to make clear to purchasers that this was a work of fiction, a “singularly well-told story” (Bookman 2: 9, 65). The visibility of this newly inclusive category of belles lettres, brandished as the hallmark for the hot new publishing firm of the early 90s, could only serve to encourage everyone – reviewers, bookbuyers, other publishers, and authors – to think beyond the law of genre and to experiment with writing that crossed boundaries. So seriously did Bodley Head authors soon take this new license, that they invoked it even when employing traditional forms. Thus, when writing for the January 1895 issue of the Yellow Book, John Davidson titled his perfectly regular metrical verse in quatrains a “Proem to ‘The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender,’” though there was no sign of prose style evident.

Of course, this interest in the blurring of genre lines was hardly unique to late-Victorian literature. A century earlier, William Blake had both alternated poetry and prose within a single work and created prose suffused with the lyrical and symbolic properties of poetry. It was to Blake that two groups of British successors – the early Pre-Raphaelites and the later Aesthetes – had looked at different points in the Victorian period when creating their own genre-bending texts. Christina Rossetti's “Maude,” for instance, which was composed in 1850 but, significantly, not published until 1897, used the frame of a short prose narrative about a pious, doomed young woman poet, then interspersed the story with samples of verse by the protagonist and her female friends. The term “belles lettres” itself, of course, was French, and from French predecessors British writers of the 1880s and 90s directly borrowed the concept of translating from one genre to the other, especially when writing prose meant to occupy the same high culture status of The Beautiful as poetry. Karl Beckson points to Baudelaire's 1849 Petits poèmes en prose as a formative influence upon Oscar Wilde's six “Poems in Prose,” from the Fortnightly Review of July 1894, and as sharing with them a form that “utilizes certain poetic devices, such as highly figurative expression and intense rhythms but without conventional stanzaic or metrical patterns” (Wilde Encyclopedia 275).

Surely it was no coincidence that the nineteenth-century British writers most powerfully drawn to transgress genre boundaries between prose and poetry were those whose politics – whether social, sexual, or artistic – were radical in general. At the end of the Victorian period, this often meant socialists, New Women, and members of the Celtic Renaissance, all groups with their own reasons for disliking the enforcement of either literary or other sorts of laws. Those who affiliated themselves with more than one cause were doubly likely to experiment with so-called “prose poems,” or to mix genres in a single volume, or to do both.

Thus, one of the first of the New Women, Olive Schreiner – a white South African colonial by birth, who became a socialist after arriving in London as an adult – began by incorporating brief episodes of prose poetry into her first published novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), through the allegory of the Hunter in Part 2, Chapter 2, and through the lyrical, visionary narratives of the penultimate chapter, called “Dreams.” The word “Dreams” would serve as the title for her next volume, which she gave over entirely to allegorical poems in prose, several of them – like Oscar Wilde's related forays in genre-fusion – occupying no more than a page or two. For a third volume, Dream Life and Real Life (1893), her publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, would supply a publication format that emphasized the cross-genre character of the three prose narratives in it. The volume, identical to that of much aesthetic poetry of the period, seemed physically attenuated – tall and slender like a figure drawn by Aubrey Beardsley, with a narrow column of text bordered by wide margins. The artistic book design itself, therefore, collaborated with the literary law-breaking of the contents to appeal to a growing audience of middle-class feminist and socialist readers for whom art and politics – and, especially, ideals of beauty and dedication to social justice – were inextricably linked.

By far the most eager and frequent travelers, however, across the borders between poetry and prose were those who joined what came to be known as the Celtic Renaissance and who looked increasingly to William Butler Yeats as their champion. Writing in English and publishing chiefly with firms based in London, these writers nonetheless addressed themselves always to two audiences, across a geographical divide. They were, on the one hand, proselytizing for an awareness of the importance of Irish culture among English critics and bookbuyers and, simultaneously, attempting to encourage scholars and artists in Ireland to cultivate an autonomous national literary tradition that might serve to inspire the political movement for independence. The notion of indigenous Irish culture which they offered, in the early 90s, shaped itself deliberately and even rebelliously as shapeless – as the antithesis of the clearly defined and rule-bound sphere of English writing. As Robert O. Driscoll has put it,

To that, I would add that the Celtic Twilight (to use the title of Yeats's 1893 volume for Lawrence and Bullen) was also the liminal literary region where the “rigid boundaries disappear[ed]” between prose and poetry.

With the Introduction to his first important literary effort on behalf of the new movement, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, W. B. Yeats would underline not only the orality of the narratives, transmitted by “story-tellers [who] used to gather together of an evening,” but the unprosaic nature of their prose, asserting that “Round these men stories tended to group themselves…. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic. These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences” (Yeats, Fairy xi–xii). Yeats's 1888 anthology combined modernized versions of Gaelic legends by male and female contemporaries (including Oscar Wilde's mother, Lady Wilde) with verse inspired by the ancient stories, such as his own “The Stolen Child.” Many of the prose retellings of the fairy narratives, moreover, could rightly have been called “prose poems” for the equal weight that they gave to the rhythmic character of words and lines.

In her study Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, Ann Owen Weekes asserts that “The English spoken by descendants of Gaelic speakers followed and still follows different idiomatic, structural, and even grammatical forms than that spoken by descendants of English speakers” (11). Irish authors writing for the English market set out to demonstrate that neither their language nor their literature could be contained within the restrictive categories of book publishing that formerly had been maintained and policed by literary critics and by reviewers for the periodical press of a London-centered world, especially the categories that separated prose from poetry. Fortunately, in the early 90s, writers affiliated with the Celtic literary movement found growing numbers of English publishers eager to tap into the marketing potential that controversy offered and thus to generate publicity for their wares. Such firms were quite willing to cooperate with authors in vaulting over the barriers, including those between genres.

Thus, Yeats framed the poetic prose narratives of his 1893 The Celtic Twilight, subtitled Men and Women, Dhouls and Fairies, with a poem at the start (“The Host”) and another at the close (“Into the Twilight”). But he was not alone in such a practice, nor was this confined to male authors of the period. Katharine Tynan (a.k.a. Mrs. H. A. Hinkson), Yeats's Dublin-born friend and frequent correspondent, began her 1894 volume for the publisher Lawrence Bullen, A Cluster of Nuts: Being Sketches Among My Own People, with her poem titled in Gaelic “Mo Craobhin Cno” [transliterated as “Ma Creevin O”] and translated by the author as “My cluster of nuts.” The first of the sketches, laid out in a text format associated with English prose, created a deliberate ambiguity as to whether poetry now had been left behind, or whether the narratives which followed would exist in a liminal territory, between genres. The rhythmic opening sentence of “A Village Genius” read, “They buried him to-day in the green God's Acre sown thickly with human dead, in the shadow of the little church with its square Norman tower, in the longer shadow of the Round Tower, raised so long ago that even its uses and its age are dimly guessed at, and that yet for all its hoariness in the verdant landscape looks Time between the eyes and defies him, as it did – how many centuries ago?” (Tynan, Cluster 1). In later sketches, moreover, verse would occasionally take over entirely from prose to carry along plot developments. At the end of “Farewell to Ballyshannon,” the story of a “heroic” mother (135) whose children have emigrated one by one to America, the conclusion is supplied not by prose, but by poetry – by the lyrics of a stanza of “the song that is in every itinerant street singer's répertoire in Ballyshannon,” leading up to a couplet rendered as “A thousand chances are to one I never may return –/Adieu to Ballyshanny and the winding banks of Erne” (137). (A side-note: Tynan's text for this ballad is remarkably, indeed uncomfortably, close to being a word-for-word copy of William Allingham's version of “The Winding Banks of Erne” from his 1887 Irish Songs and Poems, which goes unacknowledged in A Cluster of Nuts. In Celtic Renaissance writing, as this suggests, the boundaries between what was anonymous, traditional material and what was in fact attributable to modern Anglo-Irish authorship were sometimes no more clearly demarcated than were the lines between prose and poems.)

In her 1895 collection of short fiction for the London firm of Adam and Charles Black, titled An Isle in the Water, Tynan would continue to write beyond genre limits. She began its final prose piece, “The Fields of My Childhood” with the sentence, “They lie far away, gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they might never have been save only in dreams” (Tynan, Isle 209) thus drawing English readers toward a liminal site bound up with a liminal genre-status somewhere between lyrical and narrative modes. Meanwhile, the front cover created by an anonymous designer for A. and C. Black reaffirmed this effect of indeterminacy through visual means. It offered the outline of a Celtic-inspired emblem, filled in with shamrocks, against the background of green cloth and poised above a row of gilt fish diving into lines meant to represent water. From this emblem hung a rondel, several inches above the water, bearing Katharine Tynan's initials and seemingly suspended in the air, positioned neither on land nor at sea.

Katharine Tynan dedicated An Isle in the Water to another woman writer of the Irish literary revival, her friend Jane Barlow, who also moved between and sometimes fused poetry and prose. Barlow's 1892 volume for T. Fisher Unwin, Bog-Land Studies, was both “praised and condemned,” as Natalie Joy Woodall has noted, for its “attempt to recreate an authentic dialect” in English that would be reflective of Irish utterance and to do so, moreover, “in verse” through “a series of narratives concerning the Irish peasant” (Woodall, “Barlow” 39). In other words, its ambiguous linguistic and generic status, as well as its location in a space between cultures, made it a site of controversy and, therefore, a desirable property for an English publisher – at least in 1894, one year before controversy, particularly when generated by transgressive Irish figures, suddenly became an unwise and unwelcome phenomenon. The metrical form that Barlow employed in Bog-Land Studies brought to the rhyming couplet an unusually lengthy line in order to recreate the effects of Irish orality – the sense of a rapidly, almost breathlessly, spun-out voice focused on the texture of scene-setting, rather than on linear narrative. Thus, the opening “study,” titled “Th' Ould Master” began, before ever reaching its first full stop:

Was this poetry or prose? The musicality here derived not so much from either rhyme or meter, as it would have done in conventional English verse, as from the syntactical constructions of colloquial Irish speech. The cadences, moreover, with their ebb and flow created a linguistic equivalent of the ebb and flow of the waves in the land-and-seascape being described – the fluid sounds of a fluid scene. Through such an opening, in which Barlow announced to English readers her interest in establishing Ireland as a feminine zone beyond manmade borders, as the natural possession only of the sea to the west, rather than the colonial property of England to the east, Bog-Land Studies staked its claim not only to aesthetic but to political reform.

In 1892, at least, her ambitious English publisher was more than willing to cooperate in highlighting Barlow's dedication to Irish causes and so to produce a binding that served as a politically meaningful visual text. For the front cover of the volume, on which the author was identified only with the genderless initial “J. Barlow” (as on the title-page, as well), Unwin's unnamed book designer provided a line-drawing of water, with two cottages against a rolling hill. The vignette appeared to float free at the top from all moorings, the image of a liberated isle. Below this image, the words “Bog-Land” and “Studies” were united asymmetrically by a sprig of shamrock, the emblem of Irish nationalistic yearnings. Indeed, as Woodall points out in her entry for G. A. Cevasco's The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture, Jane Barlow was an “ardent supporter of Home Rule for Ireland” (Woodall, “Barlow” 39).

But the acme of genre crossing in the service of a political agenda was surely the 1894 volume Ballads in Prose. Published by the Bodley Head not long after its co-founder, Elkin Mathews, was driven out and the firm became the sole property of John Lane, its appearance followed swiftly in the wake of the Yellow Book and the equally ambitious Keynotes Series. The book thus functioned, alongside other texts in his lists, as one of John Lane's signals to the public that he was heading in calculatedly experimental directions – as much for their publicity value in general, as for any financial return these individual efforts might bring.

Ballads in Prose was the first book of Nora Hopper, an almost completely unknown writer, only twenty-three-years-old at the time, whose connection with Irish literary movements was a matter of deliberate personal choice, rather than an accident of birth and geography. As she admitted to W. B. Yeats soon after he initiated a correspondence with her in January 1895, on the basis of his admiration for Ballads in Prose, she had “never set foot in Ireland” (Yeats, Letters 436) and had produced her modernized versions in English of ancient Celtic legends and lore entirely through reading and research. Instead, she had spent her whole life in England, first in Exeter as a child and then in London. She did indeed have one Irish parent – her father, who was an officer in the British army (Welch 250); yet he could hardly have passed along his Irish linguistic or cultural traditions, for, according to Natalie Joy Woodall, he “died while she was still a baby,” and she was raised by her Welsh mother (“Hopper” 283). Hopper's determination, therefore, to identify both with Irish literature and with an oppressed people and to recreate herself as a supposedly authentic Irish voice was a political decision. I would liken it to what some progressive white musicians in the U. S. did in the 1950s and 60s, when they sang in the Southern blues idioms of African Americans to demonstrate solidarity at the time of the Civil Rights struggles. Nora Hopper may perhaps have been the harbinger of that familiar twentieth-century phenomenon, so common especially among adolescents and young adults: the “wannabe.”

The artist who was given the responsibility of designing Ballads in Prose for the Bodley Head was Joseph Walter West (1860–1933), better known as Walter West – a muralist, lithographer, landscape painter, bookplate designer, and illustrator, who had contributed work to several periodicals (Houfe 494). Why was Aubrey Beardsley, then the firm's most talked about creative force, not handed this assignment? Perhaps he was too busy looking after the art contents for the Yellow Book, which had begun publication in April 1894, while he was simultaneously providing the binding and title-page designs for each new volume of the Keynotes Series of fiction. Or perhaps a non-series volume by a nobody such as Hopper was considered a lower priority, best left to a second-string illustrator. Nevertheless, the design that Walter West produced for the front cover of Ballads in Prose was as close as anything could be to a Beardsley cover. Both Hopper's volume and Discords by “George Egerton” – that is, by the Anglo-Irish Mary Chavelita Dunne – appeared in December 1894, the latter in the Keynotes Series (named for Egerton's immensely successful Bodley Head book of 1893). Did West look at Beardsley's design for Discords first? Was he shown the pen-and-ink drawing of elongated, curving stems and leaves of wildflowers and urged to echo it, in order to produce something that would resemble a Keynotes Series book? Did the fact that George Egerton was a writer of Celtic origin, as well as a rebellious, law-breaking New Woman, suggest a reason to play up a connection between her volume and Nora Hopper's, when marketing the latter?

While giving the binding of Ballads in Prose a Beardsley-inspired floral decoration, Walter West also incorporated unique features of his own. One was the presence on the cover of shamrocks uniting the two asymmetrical halves of the title – an allusion perhaps to the design of Jane Barlow's Bog-Land Studies for Unwin, two years earlier – as well as the row of shamrocks interspersed among the flower stems. The effect was, quite literally, that of grafting Irish symbols onto an otherwise Beardsleyesque English image. West's Kelly-green cloth cover provided in visual terms a representation of the border-crossing character of the author and of her volume, both of which claimed a space between Irish and English culture. Even more significant was Walter West's innovative use of written text on the cover. At the time, few precedents existed among nineteenth-century British book designs for this use of verse as a decorative element. What West did was to take the final stanza from Nora Hopper's poem “The Wind Among the Reeds,” found on page seventy-nine, and not merely reproduce it opposite the title-page, punctuated with shamrock ornaments, but situate the same text on the front cover. Thus, West crossed a boundary himself, doing away with the carefully preserved distinction in Victorian binding-designs between covers and content.

The appearance on the cover, moreover, of a stanza of what would be clearly recognizable as verse announced to potential book-buyers the mixture of genres contained in the volume. Although the book's title, Ballads in Prose, might otherwise have led readers to expect something merely along the lines of “poems in prose” – that is, a group of short prose pieces only – the verse countered this assumption. Nora Hopper's volume daringly alternated her eleven short stories based on Celtic legends with eleven of her poems, also inspired by Irish subjects. The result was an unclassifiable text – neither wholly a collection of fiction nor of poetry, yet certainly not an anthology, for all the work was by a single author. Its ambiguous genre could only, in fact, be encompassed within the purposefully non-restrictive phrase featured in the publisher's advertisement, bound in at the back: “List of Books in BELLES LETTRES.”

The Bodley Head tried carefully to prime consumers for this genre-bending volume, before its release in December 1894, by including not one, but two contributions by Nora Hopper – one in verse, the other in prose narrative form – in the October 1894 issue of the Yellow Book and by labeling them “A Song and a Tale.” These two selections would have taught readers to expect elegiac poems, written in a modern voice (and often in the first-person), that mourned the passing of ancient Ireland's legendary glories and heroes, along with prose pieces that used self-consciously archaic idioms and terms of Gaelic origin to retell mystical and mythical occurrences drawn from the Irish oral tradition. Even so, this brief preview of Ballads in Prose could not have prepared bookbuyers adequately to receive the genre-blurring contents of Nora Hopper's volume. Not only was the language of the short narratives lyrical in character, but some of the narratives also incorporated “songs” in verse form, integrally related to the actions described.

Yet this was not the most challenging aspect of Hopper's experimentalism. Along with genre-crossing came frequent exercises in gender-crossing – suggesting once again that, in the early 90s, the breaking of one sort of law was often linked to the desire to break free of others. The first of the stories in Ballads in Prose, “The Sorrow of Manannan,” introduces a figure in early Celtic drag, when “Tuag of the Yellow Hair” is led by one of her handmaidens from “the highest hall of Tara” into the woods (Hopper 7); “Then she stopped, and stood dumb in the quicken shade: for the sleep spell was shed now from her eyes, and she saw her companion throw off the woman's robe that now was no disguise, and stand up, a goodly man and gallant, in his tunic of the gentle colour” (Hopper 10). But there is more gender uncertainty to come, along with corporeal ambiguity in general. In two of the prose narratives set in modern, not ancient, days – “Boholaun and I” and “Daluan” – the dramatized narrators prove not, like Nora Hopper, to be female speakers, but men.

The story “Daluan,” moreover, features a protagonist who identifies himself as Brian Archibald Browne, an army major who was born in Ireland, yet who is alienated from his native traditions and unable to speak Gaelic. On a trip to his homeland, he enters into friendly, indeed quite personal and intimate, conversation with a strange young man who later appears to have been a spirit, one of the long vanished “Keltic fairies” [sic] that has briefly materialized to him in an appealing human shape (103).

If there is a faint air of homoeroticism in “Daluan,” that implication becomes far more definite in another story, “The Soul of Maurice Dwyer,” where a sixteen-year-old boy believes that he is selling his soul to a servant of “the Great Dhoul,” in order to protect his mother. The act that allegedly signifies the bartering of Maurice's soul to the man who claims mystical powers is an unmistakably sexual one: “‘And here, that you may not blab of this night's doing, for our Master loves silent subjects –’ He stooped and kissed Maurice full on the lips” (Hopper 113). After receiving that kiss from the older man, Maurice is no longer able to speak to friends or family, especially to the girl whom he formerly had loved. He becomes an outcast in the community, alone with his secret; later, a band of women even lie in wait to stone him. Years of silence and estrangement pass before the story's denouement, when the man who supposedly enchanted him returns and tells Maurice that he had played a trick on the boy: he was never the devil's agent, and he had no supernatural powers. Maurice forgives him, but then suddenly dies of the shock of knowledge – and, presumably, of the weight of intolerable self-knowledge, bound up with the significance of a man-to-boy kiss on the lips that no longer can be justified as part of a mystical ritual.

Was there a conscious, as well as unconscious, connection between the breaking of rules that segregated literary genres and the possibility of such illicit excursions across other sorts of lines? Did those who, like Nora Hopper, rebelled against and disregarded certain codes of English writing see their work as part of a larger political effort to do away with other codes? Certainly, those late-Victorian authors who were, on the contrary, most careful to articulate publicly the need to distinguish between prose and poetry were often those most anxious about other kinds of freedom and most likely to exercise circumspection in their personal lives. No one, for instance, could have been more discreet and cautious in his erotic pursuits than Walter Pater, who had learned the value of prudence during the years when he had his career as an Oxford don to protect. (And yet, as Laurel Brake notes, he had found that career jeopardized all the same in 1874 by rumours of his involvement with an undergraduate; see Brake 215). Thus, unsurprisingly, Pater began his famous essay from Appreciations, the 1889 “Style,” by insisting upon the importance of respecting the boundaries that separated prose from poetry:

The world of the early 90s, which came into being a year after this statement, was one where numerous educated, middle-class women and men, writers and publishers alike, discovered that they could “make the most of things” with greater license than Pater had dared to imagine. For a time, “the laws” mandating segregation of the “characteristic excellences of verse” from those of prose seemed newly weakened and all but overthrown. But, of course, all that changed in April 1895, when Wilde brought suit against the Marquess of Queensberry and initiated the series of events that would lead to catastrophe.

I believe it to be no coincidence that, during the opening day of what was later known as the First Trial, Edward Carson's cross-examination of Oscar Wilde focused on issues of genre – on the distinction between letters on the one hand and poems on the other. Here were “the laws” returning to the literary realm with a vengeance. “Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry,” Carson read aloud with distaste, quoting from Wilde's correspondence with Lord Alfred Douglas. As the recently unearthed courtroom transcript published by Merlin Holland in Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde reveals, it was Sir Edward Clarke himself who unwisely introduced the letter into court and referred to it as “a sort of prose sonnet” (Holland 33–34), and Wilde who then called it a “prose poem” (53), giving Carson that opening for his line of questioning. In response to Carson's insinuation that this letter was to be read as documentary evidence of an unlawful relationship, Wilde asserted instead, “It is a poem” (108). Several moments later, in reference to a second letter, Wilde would say, “It isn't like the other – a prose poem. It is a letter expressive of my great devotion to Lord Alfred Douglas” (111).

For the prose poem as a form, such a mention in court by a man soon to be denounced by Mr. Justice Wills as “the center of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind” (Ellmann 448) was – at least for the foreseeable future – the kiss of death, “full on the lips,” as Nora Hopper might have put it. To have that unstable inter-genre brought into the context of a defense of same-sex “devotion,” at a trial where an Irish law-breaker went up against the English legal system, could only lead to one result. What followed was more than merely self-censorship on the part of authors who feared Wilde's fate. There was terror in the British publishing world in general and a wide-scale retreat from controversy – even from the borderlands where modes of writing mixed and intertwined.

Today, everyone knows that the Bodley Head, Wilde's publisher, reacted immediately to his arrest by withdrawing his works from its lists. But few realize how the presentation of the lists themselves changed in the months following Wilde's conviction. At the back of the July 1895 Yellow Book, John Lane ran his usual catalogue, which announced the “List of Books in BELLES LETTRES” with the words “Belles Lettres” by far the largest and most prominent ones on the page. But by the time of the October 1895 issue of the quarterly, Lane had altered radically the first page of this advertising feature. The term “Belles Lettres” had shrunk in size and moved discreetly to the bottom, subsumed into an image of the Bodley Head's shopfront drawn by E. H. New – an image of bricks and iron gates that seemed to guarantee stability, solidity, and most of all respectability. Farewell, said this unsmiling face on the new (and New) Bodley Head, to the associations with belles lettres: to the indeterminacy, the effeminacy, the gender-bending and genre-bending practiced by both men and women, especially Irish ones. Farewell, too, to the emphasis upon a French phrase, for France was where many of Wilde's supposedly degenerate comrades had gone to escape the reach of English law. By the end of the 90s, the words “belles lettres” disappeared entirely from John Lane's Bodley Head announcements.

It was a “burning shame,” Wilde had said in an epigram, “that there would be one law for men and another law for women.” But after 1895, there would indeed be the same law for women as for men, when it came to the newly conservative and restrictive atmosphere of British publishing. The fences went up between poetry and prose; women's texts, like those by their male counterparts, were herded toward one side or the other. Nora Hopper's second book for John Lane, Under Quicken Boughs of 1896, was a volume of verse alone, rather than a defiantly uncategorizable hybrid. Women writers who still insisted upon working across the boundaries of prose and poetry, such as “George Egerton” in her 1898 Fantasias, found that their texts were scarcely publicized, and that they themselves were soon dropped from the lists of Bodley Head authors. (Fantasias would be the last book of hers that John Lane agreed to issue, before cutting her loose from the firm that had made her famous and exploited her name to burnish its own reputation for encouraging avant-garde writing.) Novels, rather than prose poems, became the most desirable new literary commodities, for novels were safe as houses and could make the reputation of a badly shaken publishing house, such as John Lane's, more secure. As the century closed, women writers were, in a sense, returned to the house, after their brief wanderings in the lawless zone between poetry and prose.